Bay 12 Games Forum
Finally... => General Discussion => Topic started by: Scoops Novel on July 23, 2021, 01:21:15 pm
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Or is there a more valuable way of looking at people?
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Inasmuch as you are people and I am people and I place value in the people who is myself, I must transitively place value in the people who are not myself.
Everyone's got hopes and dreams, lad. It's okay if they're not grandiose, those who don't do have the capacity to. It's silly at best and genocidal at worst to arbitrarily determine who does and doesn't have value.
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It's a multifaceted issue.
There's I guess a 2-axis graph at its simplest?
preconceived notions or learned frameworks
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No info <-+-> All the data, context, opinions
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V
New and unfamiliar situation with no precedents
EDIT: Where independent and cognitive thought starts and reaction ends is hard to define, and is different in many situations.
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This is a hot take question that is super trap-bait.
I will (foolishly) answer anyway.
First up, the question is super loaded, and implies that all humans are fungible. This is a false presumption. However, I will answer under the premise that you meant "Most humans", or even just "A sufficiently large demographic of humans."
A sufficiently large demographic of humans are hopelessly dependent upon the social hierarchical system as a natural consequence of division of labor, and specialization. Likewise, due to division of labor and specialization, the necessary knowledge required to properly administer a massive multi-million individual society (such as a modern industrial nation) is not well conserved within the population. This results in people being forced, on the by-and-large, to resort to poorly constructed mental models that may or may not actually resemble reality.
One can easily observe this with things such as the rise of the QAnon phenomenon, or with the Antivaxx movements, or the "STOLEN ELECTION!" movements, or the "Climate change is a myth!" movement, etc.
By and large, the general population lacks all the needed knowledge and expertise needed to authoratively deal with any of those situations, and any individual human will run a rather wide gamut of potentials on how capable they are at being so, given any specific one of them.
This means that the bulk population is easily misled, especially when misinformation is highly magnified, such as through media attention, or social media amplification.
In that capacity, yes, a significant portion of the population are "Sheep" being led to slaughter by judas goats. They are not sheep because they are inherently stupid, or inherently inferior to other humans in some capacity-- it is really just the society bumping heads with the hard limitations on human cognition, with the prerequisite that a democratic society be granted ultimate authority to its citizens, with unscrupulous people capitalizing on this hard limitation for their own gain.
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Maximum disagree, because agreeing means you're a sheep.
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Again, I wanted to divorce the pejorative from the concept.
The pejorative is "Cannot think for themselves". The concept is "Follows the rhetoric or ideation of others."
People are "Sheep", in the same way that "People trust that a doctor knows more about medicine than they do." This is the direct tie-in with hard limits on cognition. A doctor becomes a doctor after spending 8 years at university, then 4 more years in a residency program. That is 12 years of their lives spent LEARNING TO BECOME a doctor, FULL TIME. That same time that they spend learning to become a doctor, is time they are NOT AVAILABLE to learn some other specialty, such as say-- High energy physics.
The issue, is that most people are a specialist of a more ordinary kind-- such as being specialized at salesmanship, or general management. The time and energy spent in reaching that specialization is time they were not able to spend learning how their government works under the hood, or how the legal system operates. (Indeed, this reality is precisely the reason why Lawyers exist, and why the adage "A man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client." is real.)
Within the confines of their specialty, they can be crack shots. Never miss. Very adept, and highly capable. -- they are not idiots incapable of original thought. This is why the pejorative needs to be divorced from the concept.
Our society is growing more and more based on specialized laborers, as the minutia of each discipline start getting more and more difficult to ignore, as things get more and more sophisticated. That growing trend toward specialization means that people are less and less capable of being able to offer cogent or sensible insights into things like national security, or national economics. (outside of course, from the appropriate specialists who would have very good grasps of those things-- but those people are minorities.)
This means that most people are 'sheep'-- they MUST defer to the rhetoric of individuals that they consider to be authoritative in that area of expertise. The ISSUE, is Dunning Kruger. The less actually capable of understanding the subject you are (due to lack of experience, education, or expertise), the less capable you become of being able to judge that competency in others (and worse still, the greater your chances of mis-identifying your own level of capability.) It is this feature that is used to systemically mislead people, and is the mechanism by which the afor mentioned "Judas goats" manage to string people along, and cajole into voting for things that are really not in their interests at all.
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Homo sapiens are a different species than Ovis aries.
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I appreciate what you're saying; and in the respect of the collective consciousness, you're right, and it will be a worsening problem. However, this is a nasty question, so lets get nasty.
Cards on the table; i agree, up until the holes in the metaphor. If we're talking about sheep-men; well, there's the problem. Sheep don't kennel themselves.
I think you can say half the sheep choose to be stupid, because it scratches a itch or thier just buggy, and the other half just can't be bothered to think so long as it's convienent.
A lot of it comes down to people being able to think within a certain scope, and no further. Within it they're reasonably intelligent; outside of it they're sheep. The size of their mind is the size of thier world.
And on the note of buggy people; there's more then one intellectual parasite we can't get rid of that take advantage of the bugs in peoples brain, where they can accept something inherently contradictory. I'm sure you can all come up with some examples.
I guess what i'm asking is if people are just waiting to be manipulated or if there's more to it.
"By and large, the general population lacks all the needed knowledge and expertise needed to authoratively deal with any of those situations, and any individual human will run a rather wide gamut of potentials on how capable they are at being so, given any specific one of them."
There's a point to be made here that people may have very consistent common ground, but the uncommon ground is plentiful. Sheep gives a impression of false uniformity, which can randomly diverge at a moments notice. Sometimes so many black sheep come together that they think they're not like the other sheep.
It really depends on the sense in which you mean it; if you're talking about people being manipulated, that's one ball game, but if you're talking about people acting as one, that's another. The peer pressure means of herding is more like... strategically placed salt licks then actual herding.
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I don't want to just state the obvious, but there is no organism on the planet less like a sheep than a human being.
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YOu havent seen some of the people I have. I honestly think I could harvest wool from some humans.
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People can't be experts or well-informed about everything on their own.
And hey, in this modern world, we have people giving/arriving at different opinionsfacts.
People are still sheep, but they have the freedumb to pick whichever fact they like more.
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It frustrates me that you can use this notion that everyone's just trying to do their own best or just trying to make it and that's somehow a metric by which to personally devalue and dismiss large swaths of the population. By any metric, you're not even looking to be convinced otherwise.
Unrelated, but I'm pretty sure that actual sheep don't actually care if a sheep's wool is black or not. That's a strictly human valuation.
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there is no organism on the planet less like a sheep than a human being
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It frustrates me that you can use this notion that everyone's just trying to do their own best or just trying to make it and that's somehow a metric by which to personally devalue and dismiss large swaths of the population. By any metric, you're not even looking to be convinced otherwise.
Unrelated, but I'm pretty sure that actual sheep don't actually care if a sheep's wool is black or not. That's a strictly human valuation.
What?
Where are you getting that from? My position is more in line with "For the same reason most people should not be practicing medicine, most people really shouldnt be practicing government"
That reason is "Most people are not trained to be [appropriate specialist with special training] (aka, doctors)"
The incorrect notion is to ascribe this as being a FAILURE. That somehow people are not living up to their potential or something. No-- I am pointing out that humans are not infinitely capable, and the neural platform we all have has fundamental limits. The need for specialization is a direct consequence of that very same limitation, and that same specialization, and the need for specialization as our civilization gets more and more complex, with more precise needs, results in Dunning Kruger being writ large.
It is not meant to demean, devalue, or ridicule anyone. It is a harsh critique of human civilization in the modern western world, as it bumps head-first into the limits of its constituent humans.
For a practical example about yourself-- (which again, this is NOT meant to demean, ridicule, or devalue you)-- Recently, the topic of gun control came up. You were unaware that the military uses otherwise consumer-grade hunting rifles in a military capacity, and just slaps a new name on it. You were "Quite sure" they did not do that, until it was demonstrated to you that they do in fact do that. That was specialist information, and minutia that was pertinent to the process of determining what guns need to be controlled, when and why, that you previously did not have, and likely would not have had, until it was pointed out to you. You are in no way stupid, nor should your insight be dismissed--- Only, that the lack of that knowledge predisposed you to simultaneously thinking you were correct about something that you were not, AND, that it predisposed you to being manipulated into supporting a ban for a gun that you would otherwise not have supported a ban of (a hunting rifle.)
There are unscrupulous people who specialize in exploiting this kind of situation for political purposes. You can find them in places like The Heritage Foundation. These are the people I refer to as "Judas Goats."
Rather than think I am excluding myself from the rest of humanity, rather, see it as a lament--- I too am afflicted. I am INCAPABLE of knowing everything I need to know, to properly and effectively utilize my ability to vote to guide the nation properly.
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No, not you, weird, and that's precisely why I think that labeling people as sheep for having convergent thought or not being willing or able to master everything is frivolous grandstanding.
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Or is there a more valuable way of looking at people?
yeah. people are just people, the same as you. reducing them to a single idea is very stupid. you got many different things going on, right? so does everyone else.
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there is no organism on the planet less like a sheep than a human being
My point may not have been adequately made
Goldfish are more like a sheep than a muman being is
Trees are more like a sheep than a human being is
Archaebacteria are more like a sheep than a human being is
yes
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humans are like 60% banana DNA tho.
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bananas never did anyone any harm. except people allergic to bananas. does that exist? they are tasty.
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it's me, the anyone bananas did harm to
or, well, they did itchy to
fruits are intimidating
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it's me, the anyone bananas did harm to
or, well, they did itchy to
fruits are intimidating
(https://i.imgur.com/Km5zYxV.png)
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They've been trying since like 2018 to remove/move the banana tree outside our house. It's been chopped down to the ground like four times, dug up at least twice (once by a cat 5 hurricane!), things have been tried to remove that banana tree.
It hasn't worked.
None of it worked.
Not only is the banana tree back to its pre-hurricane height, it's expanded its domain and is now mostly covering up a second window.
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... there's no harm there, it's a nice tree. Just wanted to share the banana tree story.
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why try to destroy the banana plant though?
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Because despite what australian childrens television says, bananas do not make good neighbors.
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I don't want to just state the obvious, but there is no organism on the planet less like a sheep than a human being.
Scorpions?
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Sea cucumber, with stolen chloroplasts?
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why try to destroy the banana plant though?
At the time they started trying, basically the whole thing had been ripped sideways by a cat 5 hurricane. They thought it was destroyed, and were trying to clear debris. After that, it was just attempting to finish the job or whatever, plus needing to get it out the way to get at other stuff and some issues with it coming back up kinda' funny the first couple of attempts at regrowing.
They've basically given up at this point, though. Banana tree won, gg no re.
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I don't want to just state the obvious, but there is no organism on the planet less like a sheep than a human being.
Scorpions?
I guess it wasn't obvious. When he says "sheep", he means "something that doesn't think for itself". Humans very obviously "think for themselves" to a greater extent than a goldfish, tree, bacterium, scorpion, dolphin, octopus, New Caledonian crow, etc etc so asking "Are people sheep?" to me suggests a response that humans are the least "sheep" thing around. Maybe not un-sheep enough for someone's liking, but certainly the least-sheep. That's it.
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I guess it wasn't obvious. When he says "sheep", he means "something that doesn't think for itself". Humans very obviously "think for themselves" to a greater extent than a goldfish, tree, bacterium, scorpion, dolphin, octopus, New Caledonian crow, etc etc so asking "Are people sheep?" to me suggests a response that humans are the least "sheep" thing around. Maybe not un-sheep enough for someone's liking, but certainly the least-sheep. That's it.
Sheep are more human than trees are sheep, though.
(Also, scorpions are asocial, so they don't groupthink.)
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Sheep are more human than trees are sheep, though.
When he says "sheep", he means "something that doesn't think for itself".
(Also, scorpions are asocial, so they don't groupthink.)
The scorpion, bacterium, tree, etc get their behavior very directly from genetics, not from their capacity for whatever physical processes we associate with the basic ability to "think for one's self". A spider doesn't learn how to build an intricate web by observing reality and never thinks about how it could build webs differently, it rather acquires that ability genetically from other spiders (its ancestors) in the most rigid and unthinking way possible. That's about as sheep as it gets, sheeper than literal sheep.
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It frustrates me that you can use this notion that everyone's just trying to do their own best or just trying to make it and that's somehow a metric by which to personally devalue and dismiss large swaths of the population. By any metric, you're not even looking to be convinced otherwise.
Unrelated, but I'm pretty sure that actual sheep don't actually care if a sheep's wool is black or not. That's a strictly human valuation.
Practical is practical. If people are dumb; they are in fact dumb. Why are you unwilling to accept negative judgements can reasonably be drawn from data?
More to the point; i literally make a thread to discuss something buzzing around my brain and i am clearly not even trying to hear a different opinion?
And then of course, you make a point of implying that i believe sheep are racist.
This is a thread about willful ignorance; whether because of emotion, or not. If you're wondering why i believe in it, look at what i've just said.
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Four legs good, two legs baaaahhhd
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It frustrates me that you can use this notion that everyone's just trying to do their own best or just trying to make it and that's somehow a metric by which to personally devalue and dismiss large swaths of the population. By any metric, you're not even looking to be convinced otherwise.
Unrelated, but I'm pretty sure that actual sheep don't actually care if a sheep's wool is black or not. That's a strictly human valuation.
Practical is practical. If people are dumb; they are in fact dumb. Why are you unwilling to accept negative judgements can reasonably be drawn from data?
More to the point; i literally make a thread to discuss something buzzing around my brain and i am clearly not even trying to hear a different opinion?
And then of course, you make a point of implying that i believe sheep are racist.
This is a thread about willful ignorance; whether because of emotion, or not. If you're wondering why i believe in it, look at what i've just said.
Sky's red. Sure, it's only in the evening, typically when there's no clouds, but the sky's red. Reasonable judgment that can be drawn from data, it's just incomplete data.
Point is, the topic is a loaded question to springboard this disdainful idea you have. I don't buy into it, and that doesn't make me willfully ignorant, because I'd have to agree with you in order not to be ignorant by your metric.
And no, the bit about black sheep isn't about racism- the metaphor about black sheep getting together and thinking they're normal is an awkward one because it's a human valuation of a nonhuman creature that doesn't care what the color of its wool is. They don't think it's normal or not, they just don't think about these things. They're sheep.
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I'll go along with the majority position on this, and say that we're not sheep.
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I think there is a substantial opinion is that Ovis aries aren't 'sheep' either. Slightly decentred but this link to a gloss on research recently published in Science might be of interest here: https://theconversation.com/clever-cockatoos-in-southern-sydney-have-learned-to-open-kerb-side-bins-and-it-has-global-significance-164794 (https://theconversation.com/clever-cockatoos-in-southern-sydney-have-learned-to-open-kerb-side-bins-and-it-has-global-significance-164794)
For decades, scientists believed humans were the only animals capable of culture. Now, thanks to the community’s observations, we can add parrots to this small (but growing) list, which also includes chimpanzees, humpback whales and New Caledonian crows.
Personally I have seen Ovis aries repeatedly engage in very thoughtful responses when encountering problems like wild dogs or inclement weather. Which leaves the foundational metaphor gasping for air.
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People will go with the crowd when they believe it is in their best interests, and they'll go against it if they believe it's in their best interests. The issue with crowds is that when everyone's saying the same thing, it's not necessarily easy to think of other things. Crowds are very good at convincing people that the crowd is right through the argumentative equivalent of brute force. At the end of the day, whether or not people are sheep is complicated. We're pack animals, but we're not eusocial animals, we rely on each other but we're not all one big hive mind. Sometimes people will follow the crowd, sometimes they won't, it all depends on how loud and convincing the crowd is.
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From an interesting book by Elias Canetti entitled Crowds and Power:
"On the questioner the effect is a feeling of enhanced power. He enjoys this and consequentially asks more and more questions; every answer he receives is an act of submission. Personal freedom consists largely in having a defense against questions. The most blatant tyranny is the one which asks the most blatant questions."
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Let's throw
puppies biological machines from rooftops like truely enlightened wordthinkers.
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The possibly-sheep are not waiting to be manipulated, they are waiting for a communication exchange on the emotional level. They are waiting for the emotional exchange that triggers the release of I-am-happily-in-my-herd drugs.
That biological system, that triggers the release of drugs, that causes emotions to be expressed in audible or visual cues, that system is always in effect even when suppressed by the cognitive mind. That system has strong influence on decision-making when the cognitive part of the mind isn't educated enough to make decisions. It is not "a choice to be stupid", it is a choice to submit without struggle in the fight for herd hierarchy. The person who is uneducated on a technology vector is forced to rely on others, and the only decision they can make is "is the emotional conversation positive?"
Emotional communication (and connection) can be more important than lingual communication and logical thought because it forms bonds through the release of happy-herd-member drugs. Addicts always seek more. Manipulators offer more. Watch a huckster selling merchandise, they are making emotional connections. Watch a manipulator saying he is like you while expressing authority and decisiveness, he is attempting to hijack your familial emotional connections.
Sheep think, it is just not as complex as dogs or humans. The bastards will not make a run for the open gate if they think they can get through in time.
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Humans are anti-sheep.
Someone will form a group to rebel against any given issue, whether important or banal. Surely, even early pre-humans had traditionalists keeping the tribe alive, and anti-traditionalists thinking the old ways were dumb and looking for new ways to do things. "This spicy rotten fruit juice good." "Me tired of nomadry. Me stay here, tend plants, make much-much spicy rotten fruit juice." "Maybe the Earth is round." "I think dried cow blood can protect me from disease." "We should use our nuclear weapons." "Everything is a coverup, the Earth is flat." "Maybe injecting dried cow blood causes autism." "Things are/aren't fine as they are."
Perhaps this is a unique quirk of Humanity that has allowed rapid technological advancement1. Or perhaps it is a common prerequisite for advanced civilizations. Will this be what lets us overcome the Great Filter and become an interstellar species, or will it all be destroyed by a group of angry space-luddites weaponizing their standardized anti-matter reactors?
1 - I like to think about China through the ages at this point. A country is not a great data point for extrapolating how aliens without the constant off-group break-offs might advance, but it's the closest real point I can think of. They were a giant ocean of stability for millennia, with everything they theoretically needed to advance, and perhaps rule the world. But they didn't use their gunpowder to build guns. They scuttled their navy of giant ships and shipyards because their political power was focused into one singular point, without anti-sheep continuing the fleet. They were too stable, and had little reason to shake up the status quo.
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Humans are anti-sheep.
Someone will form a group to rebel against any given issue, whether important or banal. Surely, even early pre-humans had traditionalists keeping the tribe alive, and anti-traditionalists thinking the old ways were dumb and looking for new ways to do things. "This spicy rotten fruit juice good." "Me tired of nomadry. Me stay here, tend plants, make much-much spicy rotten fruit juice." "Maybe the Earth is round." "I think dried cow blood can protect me from disease." "We should use our nuclear weapons." "Everything is a coverup, the Earth is flat." "Maybe injecting dried cow blood causes autism." "Things are/aren't fine as they are."
Perhaps this is a unique quirk of Humanity that has allowed rapid technological advancement1. Or perhaps it is a common prerequisite for advanced civilizations. Will this be what lets us overcome the Great Filter and become an interstellar species, or will it all be destroyed by a group of angry space-luddites weaponizing their standardized anti-matter reactors?
1 - I like to think about China through the ages at this point. A country is not a great data point for extrapolating how aliens without the constant off-group break-offs might advance, but it's the closest real point I can think of. They were a giant ocean of stability for millennia, with everything they theoretically needed to advance, and perhaps rule the world. But they didn't use their gunpowder to build guns. They scuttled their navy of giant ships and shipyards because their political power was focused into one singular point, without anti-sheep continuing the fleet. They were too stable, and had little reason to shake up the status quo.
That might be one of the single most optimistic observations of Humanity I have ever seen, Anti-Vaxxers not withstanding.
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Can't help myself from poking at this. I tried.
get their behavior very directly from genetics, not from their capacity for whatever physical processes we associate with the basic ability to "think for one's self"
You know flowstates? That level of concentration where you just succeed. That state of mind that blesses us with true greatness the like of which we love to define our species by (achievements in arts and sports, science too since it's an art, in the sense of artisanat/"hand"werk, so rather concerning sudden breakthroughs, not long methodical studies, but those aren't the sexy stories we tell ourselves anyway). Flowstates don't tend to be verbalized thought, maybe wordpieces flying by especially if it's about something technical, but not real sentences - often it's simply raw experience in action, no intermediary language parsing bits of information from A to B. I take issue in animals don't think/ don't think for themselves. They actually can't take a semantic shortcut devoid of experience, so it's litterally impossible that something could think in their place, that seems to be a special ability dependant on a specific level of language skills (the specific level being: just short of enough). You could say they don't reflect and I'd say nothing, but I would still make a face.
Long story short I should have answered as very first person with this below, and never looked back again :P
On a scale from 0 to 100? Yes.
But please don't diss sheep.
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OK, Novel Scoops has returned and clarified their (his?) question, so I'll stop shitposting and say what I actually think.
The thread right now has moved away from the original point to discuss questions of animal vs. human intelligence. On this point, we now have spinach sending emails, so. I also want to encourage everyone invested in the concept of a linear world with human intelligence at the top and everything else branching below us to look into the Great Chain of Being and think about how invested in it you want to be.
For the other question: I don't think it's possible to answer this question for people in general. Just cultural differences alone could change how much a person is willing to listen to others.
I think that the usual, metaphorical characterization of people as "sheep" whitewashes a history of rebellion under repressive regimes, and fits into a narrative of the docility of ruled people that is a. false and b. exists solely to benefit the ruling classes.
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/thread
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/thread
I rebel against this idea!
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I've said my piece. You cannot have modern societies without delegation of responsibilities and that directly stems from having and using information experts.
Failure to use those information experts is how you get bullshit dumbassery, not "Independent thinkers."
(Clarification--- Compare and contrast these statements-- "I think for myself, and dont' neet Faucci to tell me I need to wear a mask! It's just a little flu!" and "They're clearly all conspiring to make me get the vaccine for some horrible purpose, because they are trying so hard to get me to take it!" --- then cross reference those against the social media circles where people with those mindsets and ideas congregate, and turn into their own flocks, parroting and brandying those statements and that rhetoric. Are they thinking for themselves, or just delegating that thinking to a less qualified authority? I would say it is the latter.)
In a modern society, all humans are "sheep". Even the leadership. (who is dependent upon an army of specialists and their knowledge and expertise, to deliver them quality intelligence breifings, quality assessments of plans, and how prior plans operated, so that new ones can be better devised.)
The only "Not a sheep" people are the ones who live solitary hunter-gatherer lifestyles. As far as I can tell, that is the literal truth.
The issue is the pejorative, not the conception.
There is no shame, nor anything to be ashamed of, to defer to and leverage the benefits of, specialists with specialist skills and knowledge. That deference is the heart of "sheepleness".
A detractor to the above may try (wrongly) to divorce the fundemental need for deferring judgment to another authority from 'sheepleness', by trying to define the condition more like this:
Sheeple are people who trust their government blindly, and do what they are told.
Again, it is incorrect, because it tries to divorce the underlying need from the reality of the human condition, and then tries to smear it with the blame brush. Can governments (or any authority figure, for that matter) act as judas goats? of course they can. (See also Qanon-- Is Q not a maliciously crafted persona, leading people to misery, for self-serving reasons? He Q not a judas goat, and are the Qanons not sheeple? All they did was just allocate a DIFFERENT, and less qualified authority figure, then defer, as is NECESSARY, when functioning in a complex system.) That reality does not disprove the thesis--- That you MUST defer. You cannot NOT defer-- not and still avoid dangerous, systemically deleterious consequences. (See also, COVID, and the dangers posed by the large unvaccinated population.)
Deriding the 'sheeple', and proclaiming yourself a free thinker (which is demonstrably wrong, as I just gave examples of above--), is not a solution. It is a problem, in and of itself.
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Deriding the 'sheeple', and proclaiming yourself a free thinker (which is demonstrably wrong, as I just gave examples of above--), is not a solution. It is a problem, in and of itself.
And maybe in a different way (https://xkcd.com/1013/), if you do it badly...
(I was wondering if/when they'd be mentioned. 8))
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If the less qualified authority starts with "I don't trust those guys" and you don't trust those guys, you listen to the rest of the less qualified authority's spiel. If they are not asking you for money and you feel like you learned something from the spiel (because when they spewed some techno-babble and described something you didn't know about), now you feel like they gave you something of value.
When the less qualified authority succeeds at emotional communication and the qualified authority does not, part of the herd listens to and follows a different leader.
This is how "confidence games" have always worked.
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My understanding of sheep is that they are fluffy animals domesticated by humanity to be docile and dependent on humans for shearing and survival. Then there's the perjorative aspect of comparing humans to sheep; e.g. herd mentality, or sheep being led to the slaughter by a judas goat. I think there's something lost when we completely ignore comparisons between humans and animals to avoid being seen as cringe, furry and fedora, especially since the times of Aesop's fables comparing humans to animals has always been an entertaining way to tell stories.
- Most humans depend on other humans for shearing. Some humans are only semi-dependent on other humans for shearing, whilst others are completely self-sufficient. Some humans need no shearing still, whilst other humans go completely wild and never shear. So fro this one I'd say "mostly disagree."
- Herd mentality is an interesting one. Humans tend to vary in how strong their convictions are and how pliable they are, but humans also on the whole tend to behave differently when they are in a herd of humans. In this regard I would then say a human is not sheeplike; humans however, have herd mentality tendencies. The only difference between human herds and sheep herds is that the human ones will usually act a lot more violently and aggressively. There are a few exceptions - such as moments where humans will ignore an obvious threat because everyone around them is not acting upon it, but they will all act upon the threat if enough people begin acting. So for this one I'd say this is an "agree."
- Being led to the slaughter by a judas goat. Strongly agree. We are all capable of being led to our own destruction by people we really ought not to trust, even when all of our senses are instinctively warning us we are being led to our demise. The big difference however between the sheep and humans is that humans can recognise when they are being led astray but still be powerless to avert disaster because they made the Judas Goat the supreme overlord
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No, the Yule Goat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yule_goat) brings presents, not betrayal :(
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No, the Yule Goat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yule_goat) brings presents, not betrayal :(
where is your goat now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_goat)
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While the Gävle Goat is frequently betrayed... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A4vle_goat#Timeline)
(It wasn't even a significant wikiwalk.)
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- Being led to the slaughter by a judas goat. Strongly agree. We are all capable of being led to our own destruction by people we really ought not to trust, even when all of our senses are instinctively warning us we are being led to our demise. The big difference however between the sheep and humans is that humans can recognise when they are being led astray but still be powerless to avert disaster because they made the Judas Goat the supreme overlord
Another big difference is that they can reason themselves to following along despite all the warning bells ringing. Afterwards, further reasoning to themselves that it was good and right, suppressing those warning bells for when they follow deeper in.
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While the Gävle Goat is frequently betrayed... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A4vle_goat#Timeline)
(It wasn't even a significant wikiwalk.)
Not even a Trojan goat can survive in SOCIETY
Another big difference is that they can reason themselves to following along despite all the warning bells ringing. Afterwards, further reasoning to themselves that it was good and right, suppressing those warning bells for when they follow deeper in.
Hahaha, I know that feeling. When I was a young schoolboy at an underground train station with my friends, I saw smoke coming out of the tunnel. I told all of my friends there's smoke coming out, I shouted to everyone there was smoke but no one regarded me or reacted despite how obvious the smoke was. I said we should all just alert the station staff and go take another station but no one else wanted to come with me. To this day I engrave that memory in my heart because my friends actually convinced me to get on the train, when all of my senses were telling me to get everyone out of the station immediately. I was correct too - when the train entered the tunnel, the train stopped because of an electrical fire on the tracks caused by burning detritus and rubbish. Fortunately we were only stuck for a few minutes as the fire was small, yet it always fascinates me to this day that even once I could do something so foolish just because a mere platform full of people disagreed with my judgement. Like you say; in my self-doubt I provided my own reasoning for why the risk wasn't as great as the inconvenience of taking a detour, when a fire is a fire